Chapter XIII (2)

GLORIOUS OLD PALMER,--I had come to the point of feeling that my next letter _must_ be to you, when in comes your delightful "favor" of the 18th, with all its news, its convincing clipping, and its enclosures from Bakewell and Sheldon. I have had many impulses to write to Bakewell, but they have all aborted--my powers being so small and so much _in Anspruch genommen_ by correspondence already under way. I judge him to be well and happy. What think you of his wife? I suppose she is no relation of yours. I shouldn't think any of your three candidates would do for that conventional Bryn Mawr. She stoneth the prophets, and I wish she would get X---- and get stung. He made a _deplorable_ impression on me many years ago. The only comment _I_ heard when I gave my address there lately (the last one in my "Talks") was that A---- had hoped for something more technical and psychological! Nevertheless, some good girls seem to come out at Bryn Mawr. I am awfully sorry that Perry is out of place. Unless he gets something good, it seems to me that we ought to get him for a course in Kant. He is certainly the soundest, most normal all-round man of our recent production. Your list for next year interests me muchly. I am glad of Münsterberg's and Santayana's new courses, and hope they'll be good. I'm glad you're back in Ethics and glad that Royce has "Epistemology"--portentous name, and small result, in my opinion, but a substantive _discipline_ which ought, _par le temps qui court_, to be treated with due formality. I look forward with eagerness to his new volume.[30] What a colossal feat he has performed in these two years--all thrown in by the way, as it were.

Certainly Gifford lectures are a good institution for stimulating production. They have stimulated me so far to produce two lectures of wishy-washy generalities. What is that for a "showing" in six months of absolute leisure? The second lecture used me up so that I must be off a good while again.

No! dear Palmer, the best I can possibly hope for at Cambridge after my return is to be able to carry one half-course. So make all calculations accordingly. As for Windelband, how can I ascertain anything except by writing to him? I shall see no one, nor go to any University environment. My impression is that we must go in for budding genius, if we seek a European. If an American, we can get a _sommité_! But who? in either case? Verily there is room at the top. S---- seems to be the only Britisher worth thinking of. I imagine we had better train up our own men. A----, B----, C----, either would no doubt do, especially A---- if his health improves. D---- is our last card, from the point of view of policy, no doubt, but from that of inner organization it seems to me that he may have too many points of coalescence with both Münsterberg and Royce, especially the latter.

The great event in my life recently has been the reading of Santayana's book.[31] Although I absolutely reject the platonism of it, I have literally squealed with delight at the imperturbable perfection with which the position is laid down on page after page; and grunted with delight at such a thickening up of our Harvard atmosphere. If our students now could begin really to understand what Royce means with his voluntaristic-pluralistic monism, what Münsterberg means with his dualistic scientificism and platonism, what Santayana means by his pessimistic platonism (I wonder if he and Mg. have had any close mutually encouraging intercourse in this line?), what I mean by my crass pluralism, what you mean by your ethereal idealism, that these are so many religions, ways of fronting life, and worth fighting for, we should have a genuine philosophic universe at Harvard. The best condition of it would be an open conflict and rivalry of the diverse systems. (Alas! that I should be out of it, just as my chance begins!) The world might ring with the struggle, if we devoted ourselves exclusively to belaboring each other.

I now understand Santayana, the man. I never understood him before. But what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy! I don't think I ever knew the anti-realistic view to be propounded with so impudently superior an air. It is refreshing to see a representative of moribund Latinity rise up and administer such reproof to us barbarians in the hour of our triumph. I imagine Santayana's _style_ to be entirely spontaneous. But it has curious classic echoes. Whole pages of pure Hume in style; others of pure Renan. Nevertheless, how fantastic a philosophy!--as if the "world of values" _were_ independent of existence. It is only as _being_, that one thing is better than another. The idea of darkness is as good as that of light, as ideas. There is more value in light's _being_. And the exquisite consolation, when you have ascertained the badness of all fact, in knowing that badness is inferior to goodness, to the end--it only rubs the pessimism in. A man whose egg at breakfast turns out always bad says to himself, "Well, bad and good are not the same, anyhow." That is just the trouble! Moreover, when you come down to the facts, what do your harmonious and integral ideal systems prove to be? in the concrete? Always things burst by the growing content of experience. Dramatic unities; laws of versification; ecclesiastical systems; scholastic doctrines. Bah! Give me Walt Whitman and Browning ten times over, much as the perverse ugliness of the latter at times irritates me, and intensely as I have enjoyed Santayana's attack. The barbarians are in the line of mental growth, and those who do insist that the ideal and the real are dynamically continuous are those by whom the world is to be saved. But I'm nevertheless delighted that the other view, always existing in the world, should at last have found so splendidly impertinent an expression among ourselves. I have meant to write to Santayana; but on second thoughts, and to save myself, I will just ask you to send him this. It saves him from what might be the nuisance of having to reply, and on my part it has the advantage of being more free-spoken and direct. He is certainly an _extraordinarily distingué_ writer. Thank him for existing!

As a contrast, read Jack Chapman's "Practical Agitation." The other pole of thought, and a style all splinters--but a gospel for our rising generation--I hope it will have its effect.

Send me your Noble lectures. I don't see how you could risk it without a MS. If you did fail (which I doubt) you deserved to. Anyhow the printed page makes everything good.

I can no more! Adieu! How is Mrs. Palmer this winter? I hope entirely herself again. You are impartially silent of her and of my wife! The "Transcript" continues to bless us. We move from this hospitable roof to the hotel at Costebelle today. Thence after a fortnight to Geneva, and in May to Nauheim once more, to be reëxamined and sentenced by Schott. Affectionately yours,

W. J.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

COSTEBELLE, _Apr. 12, 1900_.

DEAREST FANNY,--Your letters continue to rain down upon us with a fidelity which makes me sure that, however it may once have been, _now_, on the principle of the immortal Monsieur Perrichon, we must be firmly rooted in your affections. You can never "throw over" anybody for whom you have made such sacrifices. All qualms which I might have in the abstract about the injury we must be inflicting on so busy a Being by making her, through our complaints of poverty, agony, and exile, keep us so much "on her mind" as to tune us up every two or three days by a long letter to which she sacrifices all her duties to the family and state, disappear, moreover, when I consider the character of the letters themselves. They are so easy, the facts are so much the immediate out-bubblings of the moment, and the delicious philosophical reflexions so much like the spontaneous breathings of the soul, that the _effort_ is manifestly at the zero-point, and into the complex state of affection which necessarily arises in you for the objects of so much loving care, there enter none of those curious momentary arrows of impatience and vengefulness which might make others say, if they were doing what you do for us, that they wished we were dead or in some way put beyond reach, so that our eternal "appeal" might stop. No, Fanny! we have no repinings and feel no responsibilities towards you, but accept you and your letters as the gifts you are. The infrequency of our answering proves this fact; to which you in turn must furnish the correlative, if the occasion comes. On the day when you temporarily hate us, or don't "feel like" the usual letter, don't let any thought of inconsistency with your past acts worry you about not taking up the pen. Let us go; though it be for weeks and months--I shall know you will come round again. "Neither heat nor frost nor thunder shall ever do away, I ween, the marks of that which once hath been." And to think that you should never have spent a night, and only once taken a meal, in our house! When we get back, we must see each other daily, and may the days of both of us be right long in the State of Massachusetts! Bless her!

I got a letter from J. J. Chapman praising her strongly the other day. And sooth to say the "Transcript" and the "Springfield Republican," the reception of whose "weeklies" has become one of the solaces of my life, do make a first-rate showing for her civilization. One can't just say what "tone" consists in, but these papers hold their own excellently in comparison with the English papers. There is far less alertness of mind in the general make-up of the latter; and the "respectability" of the English editorial columns, though it shows a correcter literary drill, is apt to be due to a remorseless longitude of commonplace conventionality that makes them deadly dull. (The "Spectator" appears to be the only paper with a nervous system, in England--that of a _carnassier_ at present!) The English people seem to have positively a passionate hunger for this mass of prosy stupidity, never less than a column and a quarter long. The Continental papers of course are "nowhere." As for our yellow papers--every country has its criminal classes, and with us and in France, they have simply got into journalism as part of their professional evolution, and they must be got out. Mr. Bosanquet somewhere says that so far from the "dark ages" being over, we are just at the beginning of a new dark-age period. He means that ignorance and unculture, which then were merely brutal, are now articulate and possessed of a literary voice, and the fight is transferred from fields and castles and town walls to "organs of publicity"; but it is the same fight, of reason and goodness against stupidity and passions; and it must be fought through to the same kind of success. But it means the reëducating of perhaps twenty more generations; and by that time some altogether new kind of institutional opportunity for the Devil will have been evolved.

_April_ 13th. I had to stop yesterday.... Six months ago, I shouldn't have thought it possible that a life deliberately founded on pottering about and dawdling through the day would be endurable or even possible. I have attained such skill that I doubt if my days ever at any time seemed to glide by so fast. But it corrodes one's soul nevertheless. I scribble a little in bed every morning, and have reached page 48 of my third Gifford lecture--though Lecture II, alas! must be rewritten entirely. The conditions don't conduce to an energetic grip of the subject, and I am afraid that what I write is pretty slack and not what it would be if my vital tone were different. The problem I have set myself is a hard one: _first_, to defend (against all the prejudices of my "class") "experience" against "philosophy" as being the real backbone of the world's religious life--I mean prayer, guidance, and all that sort of thing immediately and privately felt, as against high and noble general views of our destiny and the world's meaning; and _second_, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind's most important function. A task well-nigh impossible, I fear, and in which I shall fail; but to attempt it is _my_ religious act.

We got a visit the other day from [a Scottish couple here who have heard that I am to give the Gifford lectures]; and two days ago went to afternoon tea with them at their hotel, next door. _She_ enclosed a tract (by herself) in the invitation, and proved to be a [mass] of holy egotism and conceit based on professional invalidism and self-worship. I wish my sister Alice were there to "react" on her with a description! Her husband, apparently weak, and the slave of her. No talk but evangelical talk. It seemed assumed that a Gifford lecturer must be one of Moody's partners, and it gave me rather a foretaste of what the Edinburgh atmosphere may be like. Well, I shall enjoy sticking a knife into its gizzard--if atmospheres have gizzards? Blessed be Boston--probably the freest place on earth, that isn't merely heathen and sensual.

I have been supposing, as one always does, that you "ran in" to the Putnams' every hour or so, and likewise they to No. 12. But your late allusion to the telephone and the rarity of your seeing Jim [Putnam] reminded me of the actual conditions--absurd as they are. (Really you and we are nearer together now at this distance than we have ever been.) Well, let Jim see this letter, if you care to, flattering him by saying that it is more written for him than for you (which it certainly has not been till this moment!), and thanking him for existing in this naughty world. His account of the Copernican revolution (studento-centric) in the Medical School is highly exciting, and I am glad to hear of the excellent little Cannon becoming so prominent a reformer. Speaking of reformers, do you see Jack Chapman's "Political Nursery"? of which the April number has just come. (I have read it and taken my bed-breakfast during the previous page of this letter, though you may not have perceived the fact.) If not, _do_ subscribe to it; it is awful fun. He just looks at things, and tells the truth about them--a strange thing even to _try_ to do, and he doesn't always succeed. Office 141 Broadway, $1.00 a year.

Fanny, you won't be reading as far as this in this interminable letter, so I stop, though 100 pent-up things are seeking to be said. The weather has still been so cold whenever the sun is withdrawn that we have delayed our departure for Geneva to the 22nd--a week later. We make a short visit to our friends the Flournoys (a couple of days) and then proceed towards Nauheim _via_ Heidelberg, where I wish to consult the great Erb about the advisability of more baths in view of my nervous complications, before the great Schott examines me again. I do wish I could send for Jim for a consultation. Good-bye, dearest and best of Fannys. I hope your Mother is wholly well again. Much love to her and to Mary Elliot. It interested me to hear of Jack E.'s great operation. Yours ever,

W. J.

_To his Son Alexander._

[GENEVA, _circa May 3, 1900_.]

DEAR FRANÇOIS,--Here we are in Geneva, at the Flournoys'--dear people and splendid children. I wish Harry could marry Alice, Billy marry Marguerite, and you marry Ariane-Dorothée--the absolutely jolliest and beautifullest 3-year old I ever saw. I am trying to get you engaged! I enclose pictures of the dog. Ariane-Dorothée r-r-r-olls her r-r-r's like fury. I got your picture of the elephant--very good. Draw everything you see, no matter how badly, trying to notice how the lines run--one line every day!--just notice it and draw it, no matter how badly, and at the end of the year you'll be s'prised to see how well you can draw. Tell Billy to get you a big blank book at the Coöp., and every day take one page, just drawing down on it some _thing_, or _dog_, or _horse_, or _man_ or _woman_, or _part_ of a man or woman, which you have looked at that day just for the purpose, to see how the lines run. I bet the last page of that book will be better than the first! Do this for my sake. Kiss your dear old Grandma. P'r'aps, we shall get home this summer after all. In two or three days I shall see a doctor and know more about myself. Will let you know. Keep motionless and listen as much as you can. Take in things without speaking--it'll make you a better man. Your Ma thinks you'll grow up into a filosopher like me and write books. It is easy enuff, all but the writing. You just get it out of other books, and write it down. Always your loving,

DAD.

At this time James's thirteen-year-old daughter was living with family friends--the Joseph Thatcher Clarkes--in Harrow, and was going to an English school with their children. She had been passing through such miseries as a homesick child often suffers, and had written letters which evoked the following response.

_To his Daughter._

VILLA LUISE, BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 26, 1900_.

DARLING PEG,--Your letter came last night and explained sufficiently the cause of your long silence. You have evidently been in a bad state of spirits again, and dissatisfied with your environment; and I judge that you have been still more dissatisfied with the inner state of trying to consume your own smoke, and grin and bear it, so as to carry out your mother's behests made after the time when you scared us so by your inexplicable tragic outcries in those earlier letters. Well! I believe you have been trying to do the manly thing under difficult circumstances, but one learns only gradually to do the _best_ thing; and the best thing for you would be to write at least weekly, if only a post-card, and say just how things are going. If you are in bad spirits, there is no harm whatever in communicating that fact, and defining the character of it, or describing it as exactly as you like. The bad thing is to pour out the _contents_ of one's bad spirits on others and leave them with it, as it were, on their hands, as if it was for them to do something about it. That was what you did in your other letter which alarmed us so, for your shrieks of anguish were so excessive, and so unexplained by anything you told us in the way of facts, that we didn't know but what you had suddenly gone crazy. That is the _worst_ sort of thing you can do. The middle sort of thing is what you do this time--namely, keep silent for more than a fortnight, and when you do write, still write rather mysteriously about your sorrows, not being quite open enough.

Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; and dissatisfaction with one's self, and irritation at others, and anger at circumstances and stony insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it rightly. [_From margin._] (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short a time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't _want_ to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it--that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make ourselves do something different, go with people, speak cheerfully, set ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of _yourself_ all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of _things_ and of _other people_--no matter what's the matter with our self.

I have no doubt you are doing as well as you know how, darling little Peg; but we have to learn everything, and I also have no doubt that you'll manage it better and better if you ever have any more of it, and soon it will fade away, simply leaving you with more experience. The great thing for you _now_, I should suppose, would be to enter as friendlily as possible into the interest of the Clarke children. If you like them, or acted as if you liked them, you needn't trouble about the question of whether they like you or not. They probably will, fast enough; and if they don't, it will be their funeral, not yours. But this is a great lecture, so I will stop. The great thing about it is that it is all true.

The baths are threatening to disagree with me again, so I may stop them soon. Will let you know as quick as anything is decided. Good news from home: the Merrimans have taken the Irving Street house for another year, and the Wambaughs (of the Law School) have taken Chocorua, though at a reduced rent. The weather here is almost continuously cold and sunless. Your mother is sleeping, and will doubtless add a word to this when she wakes. Keep a merry heart--"time and the hour run through the roughest day"--and believe me ever your most loving

W. J.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

[Post-card]

ALTDORF, LAKE LUZERN, _July 20, [1900]_.

Your last letter was, if anything, a more unmitigated blessing than its predecessors; and I, with my curious inertia to overcome, sit _thinking of letters_, and of the soul-music with which they might be filled if my tongue could only utter the thoughts that arise in me to youward, the beauty of the world, the conflict of life and death and youth and age and man and woman and righteousness and evil, etc., and Europe and America! but it stays all caked within and gets no articulation, the power of speech being so non-natural a function of our race. We are staying above Luzern, near a big spruce wood, at "Gutsch," and today being hot and passivity advisable, we came down and took the boat, for a whole day on the Lake. The works both of Nature and of Man in this region seem too perfect to be credible almost, and were I not a bitter Yankee, I would, without a moment's hesitation, be a Swiss, and probably then glad of the change. The _goodliness_ of this land is one of the things I ache to utter to you, but can't. Some day I will write, also to Jim P. My condition baffles me. I have lately felt better, but been bad again, and altogether can _do_ nothing without repentance afterwards. We have just lunched in this bowery back verandah, water trickling, beautiful old convent sleeping up the hillside. Love to you all!

W. J.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

BAD-NAUHEIM, _Sept. 16, 1900_.

DEAREST FANNY,-- ...Here I am having a little private picnic all by myself, on this effulgent Sunday morning--real American September weather, by way of a miracle. I ordered my bath-chair man to wheel me out to the "Hochwald," where, he having been dismissed for three hours, until two o'clock, I am lying in the said luxurious throne, writing this on my knee, with nothing between but a number of Kuno Fischer's "Hegel's Leben, Werke und Lehre," now in process of publication, and the flexibility of which accounts for the poor handwriting. I am alone, save for the inevitable restaurant which hovers on the near horizon, in a beautiful grove of old oak trees averaging some 16 or 18 feet apart, through whose leaves the sunshine filters and dapples the clear ground or grass that lies between them. Alice is still in England, having finally at my command had to give up her long-cherished plan of a run home to see her mother, the children, you, and all the other _dulcissima mundi nomina_ that make of life a thing worth living for. I _funked_ the idea of being alone so long when I came to the point. It is not that I am worse, but there will be cold weather in the next couple of months; and, unable to sit out of doors then, as here and now, I shall probably either have to over-walk or over-read, and both things will be bad for me.

Chocorua, September, 1903. One morning James and Royce strolled into the road and sat down on a wall in earnest discussion. When James heard the camera click, as his daughter took the upper snap-shot, he cried, "Royce, you're being photographed! Look, out! I say _Damn the Absolute_!"]

As things are _now_, I get on well enough, for the bath business (especially the "bath-chair") carries one through a good deal of the day. The great Schott has positively forbidden me to go to England as I did last year; so, early in October, our faces will be turned towards Italy, and by Nov. 1 we shall, I hope, be ensconced in a _pension_ close to the Pincian Garden in Rome, to see how long _that_ resource will last. I confess I am in the mood of it, and that there is a suggestion of more richness about the name of Rome than about that of Rye, which, until Schott's veto, was the plan. How the Gifford lectures will fare, remains to be seen. I have felt strong movings towards home this fall, but reflection says: "Stay another winter," and I confess that now that October is approaching, it feels like the home-stretch and as if the time were getting short and the limbs of "next summer" in America burning through the veil which seems to hide them in the shape of the second European winter months. Who knows? perhaps I may be spry and active by that time! I have still one untried card up my sleeve, that may work wonders. All I can say of this third course of baths is that so far it seems to be doing me no harm. That it will do me any substantial good, after the previous experiences, seems decidedly doubtful. But one must suffer some inconvenience to please the doctors! Just as in most women there is a wife that craves to suffer and submit and be bullied, so in most men there is a _patient_ that needs to have a doctor and obey his orders, whether they be believed in or not....

Don't take the Malwida book[32] too seriously. I sent it _faute de mieux_. I don't think I ever told you how much I enjoyed hearing the Lesley volume[33] read aloud by Alice. We were just in the exactly right condition for enjoying that breath of old New England. Good-bye, dearest Fanny. Give my love to your mother, Mary, J. J. P., and all your circle. _Leb' wohl_ yourself, and believe me, your ever affectionate,

W. J.

_To Josiah Royce._

NAUHEIM, _Sept. 26, 1900_.

BELOVED ROYCE,--Great was my, was _our_ pleasure in receiving your long and delightful letter last night. Like the lioness in Æsop's fable, you give birth to one young one only in the year, but that one is a lion. I give birth mainly to guinea-pigs in the shape of post-cards; but despite such diversities of epistolary expression, the heart of each of us is in the right place. I need not say, my dear old boy, how touched I am at your expressions of affection, or how it pleases me to hear that you have missed me. I too miss you profoundly. I do not find in the hotel waiters, chambermaids and bath-attendants with whom my lot is chiefly cast, that unique mixture of erudition, originality, profundity and vastness, and human wit and leisureliness, by accustoming me to which during all these years you have spoilt me for inferior kinds of intercourse. You are still the centre of my gaze, the pole of my mental magnet. When I write, 'tis with one eye on the page, and one on you. When I compose my Gifford lectures mentally, 'tis with the design exclusively of overthrowing your system, and ruining your peace. I lead a parasitic life upon you, for my highest flight of ambitious ideality is to become your conqueror, and go down into history as such, you and I rolled in one another's arms and silent (or rather loquacious still) in one last death-grapple of an embrace. How then, O my dear Royce, can I forget you, or be contented out of your close neighborhood? Different as our minds are, yours has nourished mine, as no other social influence ever has, and in converse with you I have always felt that my life was being lived importantly. Our minds, too, are not different in the _Object_ which they envisage. It is the whole paradoxical physico-moral-spiritual Fatness, of which most people single out some skinny fragment, which we both cover with our eye. We "aim at him generally"--and most others don't. I don't believe that we shall dwell apart forever, though our formulas may.

Home and Irving Street look very near when seen through these few winter months, and tho' it is still doubtful what I may be able to do in College, for social purposes I shall be available for probably numerous years to come. I haven't got at work yet--only four lectures of the first course written (strange to say)--but I am decidedly better today than I have been for the past ten months, and the matter is all ready in my mind; so that when, a month hence, I get settled down in Rome, I think the rest will go off fairly quickly. The second course I shall have to resign from, and write it out at home as a book. It must seem strange to you that the way from the mind to the pen should be as intraversable as it has been in this case of mine--you in whom it always seems so easily pervious. But Miller will be able to tell you all about my condition, both mental and physical, so I will waste no more words on that to me decidedly musty subject.

I fully understand your great aversion to letters and other off-writing. You have done a perfectly Herculean amount of the most difficult productive work, and I believe you to be much more tired than you probably yourself suppose or know. Both mentally and physically, I imagine that a long vacation, in other scenes, with no sense of duty, would do you a world of good. I don't say the full fifteen months--for I imagine that one summer and one academic half-year would perhaps do the business better--you could preserve the relaxed and desultory condition as long as that probably, whilst later you'd begin to chafe, and _then_ you'd better be back in your own library. If _my_ continuing abroad is hindering this, my sorrow will be extreme. Of course I must some time come to a definite decision about my own relations to the College, but I am reserving that till the end of 1900, when I shall write to Eliot in full. There is still a therapeutic card to play, of which I will say nothing just now, and I don't want to commit myself before that has been tried.

You say nothing of the second course of Aberdeen lectures, nor do you speak at all of the Dublin course. Strange omissions, like your not sending me your Ingersoll lecture! I assume that the publication of [your] Gifford Volume II will not be very long delayed. I am eager to read them. I can read philosophy now, and have just read the first three _Lieferungen_ of K. Fischer's "Hegel." I must say I prefer the original text. Fischer's paraphrases always flatten and dry things out; and he gives no rich sauce of his own to compensate. I have been sorry to hear from Palmer that he also has been very tired. One can't keep going forever! P. has been like an archangel in his letters to me, and I am inexpressibly grateful. Well! everybody has been kinder than I deserve....

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

ROME, _Dec. 25, 1900_.

...Rome is simply the most satisfying lake of picturesqueness and guilty suggestiveness known to this child. Other places have single features better than anything in Rome, perhaps, but for an _ensemble_ Rome seems to beat the world. Just a FEAST for the eye from the moment you leave your hotel door to the moment you return. Those who say that beauty is all made up of suggestion are well disproved here. For the things the eyes most gloat on, the inconceivably corrupted, besmeared and ulcerated surfaces, and black and cavernous glimpses of interiors, have no suggestions save of moral horror, and their "tactile values," as Berenson would say, are pure gooseflesh. Nevertheless the sight of them delights. And then there is such a geologic stratification of history! I dote on the fine equestrian statue of Garibaldi, on the Janiculum, quietly bending his head with a look half-meditative, half-strategical, but wholly victorious, upon Saint Peter's and the Vatican. What luck for a man and a party to have opposed to it an enemy that stood up for _nothing_ that was ideal, for _everything_ that was mean in life. Austria, Naples, and the Mother of harlots here, were enough to deify anyone who defied them. What glorious things are some of these Italian inscriptions--for example on Giordano Bruno's statue:--

A BRUNO

_il secolo da lui divinato qui dove il rogo arse_.

--"here, where the faggots burned." It makes the tears come, for the poetic justice; though I imagine B. to have been a very pesky sort of a crank, worthy of little sympathy had not the "rogo" done its work on him. Of the awful corruptions and cruelties which this place suggests there is no end.

Our neighbors in rooms and _commensaux_ at meals are the J. G. Frazers--he of the "Golden Bough," "Pausanias," and other three-and six-volume works of anthropological erudition, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a sucking babe of humility, unworldliness and molelike sightlessness to everything except _print_.... He, after Tylor, is the greatest authority now in England on the religious ideas and superstitions of primitive peoples, and he knows nothing of psychical research and thinks that the trances, etc., of savage soothsayers, oracles and the like, are all _feigned_! Verily science is amusing! But he is conscience incarnate, and I have been stirring him up so that I imagine he will now proceed to put in big loads of work in the morbid psychological direction.

Dear Fanny ... I can write no more this morning. I hope your Christmas is "merry," and that the new year will be "happy" for you all. Pray take our warmest love, give it to your mother and Mary, and some of it to the brothers. I will write better soon. Your ever grateful and affectionate

W. J.

Don't let up on your own writing, so say we both! Your letters are pure blessings.

_To James Sully._

ROME, _Mar. 3, 1901_.

DEAR SULLY,--Your letter of Feb. 8th arrived duly and gave me much pleasure _qua_ epistolary manifestation of sympathy, but less _qua_ revelation of depression on your own part. I have been so floundering up and down, now above and now below the line of bad nervous prostration, that I have written no letters for three weeks past, hoping thereby the better to accomplish certain other writing; but the other writing had to be stopped so letters and post-cards may begin.

I see you take the war still very much to heart, and I myself think that the blundering way in which the Colonial Office drove the Dutchmen into it, with no conception whatever of the psychological situation, is only outdone by our still more anti-psychological blundering in the Philippines. Both countries have lost their moral prestige--we far more completely than you, because for our conduct there is literally _no_ excuse to be made except _absolute_ stupidity, whilst you can make out a very fair case, as such cases go. But we can, and undoubtedly shall, draw back, whereas that for an Empire like yours seems politically impossible. Empire anyhow is half crime by necessity of Nature, and to see a country like the United States, lucky enough to be born outside of it and its fatal traditions and inheritances, perversely rushing to wallow in the mire of it, shows how strong these ancient race instincts be. And that is my consolation! We are no worse than the best of men have ever been. We are simply not superhuman; and the loud reaction against the brutal business, in both countries, shows how the _theory_ of the matter has really advanced during the last century.

Yes! H. Sidgwick is a sad loss, with all his remaining philosophic wisdom unwritten. I feel greatly F. W. H. Myers's loss also. He suffered terribly with suffocation, but bore it stunningly well. He died in this very hotel, where he had been not more than a fortnight. I don't know _how_ tolerant (or intolerant) you are towards his pursuits and speculations. I regard them as fragmentary and conjectural--of course; but as most laborious and praiseworthy; and knowing how much psychologists as a rule have counted him out from their profession, I have thought it my duty to write a little tribute to his service to psychology to be read on March 8th, at a memorial meeting of the S. P. R. in his honor. It will appear, whether read or not, in the Proceedings, and I hope may not appear to you exaggerated. I seriously believe that the general problem of the subliminal, as Myers propounds it, promises to be one of the _great_ problems, possibly even the greatest problem, of psychology....

We leave Rome in three days, booked for Rye the first of April. I _must_ get into the _country!_ If I do more than just pass through London, I will arrange for a meeting. My Edinburgh lectures begin early in May--after that I shall have freedom. Ever truly yours,

Wm. James.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

[Post-card]

FLORENCE, _March 18, 1901_.

Thus far towards home, thank Heaven! after a week at Perugia and Assisi. Glorious air, memorable scenes. Made acquaintance of Sabatier, author of St. Francis's life--very jolly. Best of all, made acquaintance with Francis's retreat in the mountain. _Navrant!_--it makes one see medieval Christianity face to face. The lair of the individual wild animal, and that animal the saint! I hope you saw it. Thanks for your last letter to Alice. Lots of love.

W. J.

_To F. C. S. Schiller._

RYE, _April 13, 1901_.

DEAR SCHILLER,--You are showering benedictions on me. I return the bulky ones, keeping the lighter weights. I think the parody on Bradley amazingly good--if I had his book here I would probably revive my memory of his discouraged style and scribble a marginal contribution of my own. He is, really, an extra humble-minded man, I think, but even more humble-minded about his reader than about himself, which gives him that false air of arrogance. How you concocted those epigrams, _à la_ preface of B., I don't see. In general I don't see how an epigram, being a pure bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ. On the Limericks, as you call them, I set less store, much less. If everybody is to come in for a share of allusion, I am willing, but I don't want my name to figure in the ghostly ballet with but few companions. Royce wrote a _very_ funny thing in pedantic German some years ago, purporting to be the proof by a distant-future professor that I was an habitual drunkard, based on passages culled from my writings. He may have it yet. If I ever get any animal spirits again, I may get warmed up, by your example, into making jokes, and may then contribute. But I beg you let this thing mull till you get a _lot_ of matter--and then _sift_. It's the only way. But Oxford seems a better climate for epigram than is the rest of the world.

I shall stay here--I find myself much more comfortable thoracically already than when I came--until my Edinburgh lectures begin on May 16th, though I shall have to run up to London towards the end of the month to get some clothes made, and to meet my son who arrives from home. I much regret that it will be quite impossible for me to go either to Oxford or Cambridge--though, if things took an unexpectedly good turn, I might indeed do so after June 18th, when my lecture course ends. Do you meanwhile keep hearty and "funny"! I stopped at Gersau half a day and found it a sweet little place. Fondly yours,

W. J.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

ROXBURGHE HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _May 15, 1901_.

DEAREST FANNY,--You see where we are! I give _you_ the first news of life's journey being so far advanced! It is a deadly enterprise, I'm afraid, with the social entanglements that lie ahead, and I feel a cake of ice in my epigastrium at the prospect, but _le vin est versé, il faut le boire_, and from the other point of view, that it is real life beginning once more, it is perfectly glorious, and I feel as if yesterday in leaving London I had said good-bye to a rather dreadful and death-bound segment of life. As regards the sociability, it is fortunately a time of year in which only the medical part of the University is present. The professors of the other faculties are already in large part scattered, I think,--at least the two Seths (who are the only ones I directly know) are away, and I have written to the Secretary of the Academic Senate, Sir Ludovic Grant of the Law Faculty, that I am unable to "dine out" or attend afternoon receptions, so we may be pretty well left alone. I always hated lecturing except as regular instruction to students, of whom there will probably be none now in the audience. But to compensate, there begins next week a big convocation here of all ministers in Scotland, and there will doubtless be a number of them present, which, considering the matter to be offered, is probably better.

We had a splendid journey yesterday in an American (almost!) train, first-class, and had the pleasure of some talk with our Cambridge neighbor, Mrs. Ole Bull, on her way to Norway to the unveiling of a monument to her husband. She was accompanied by an extraordinarily fine character and mind--odd way of expressing myself!--a young Englishwoman named Noble, who has Hinduized herself (converted by Vivekananda to his philosophy) and lives now for the Hindu people. These free individuals who live their own life, no matter what domestic prejudices have to be snapped, are on the whole a refreshing sight to me, who can do nothing of the kind myself. And Miss Noble[34] is a most deliberate and balanced person--no frothy enthusiast in point of character, though I believe her philosophy to be more or less false. Perhaps no more so than anyone else's!

We are in one of those deadly respectable hotels where you have to ring the front-door-bell. Give me a cheerful, blackguardly place like the Charing Cross, where we were in London. The London tailor and shirtmaker, it being in the height of the Season, didn't fulfill their promises; and as I sloughed my ancient cocoon at Rye, trusting to pick up my iridescent wings the day before yesterday in passing through the metropolis, I am here with but two _chemises_ at present (one of them now in the wash) and fear that tomorrow, in spite of tailors' promises to send, I may have to lecture in my pyjamas--that would give a cachet of American originality. The weather is fine--we have just finished breakfast.

Our son Harry ... and his mother will soon sally out to explore the town, whilst I lie low till about noon, when I shall report my presence and receive instructions from my boss, Grant, and prepare to meet the storm. It is astonishing how pusillanimous two years of invalidism can make one. Alice and Harry both send love, and so do I in heaps and steamer-loads, dear Fanny, begging your mother to take of it as much as she requires for her share. I will write again--doubtless--tomorrow.

_May 17._

It proved quite impossible to write to you yesterday, so I do it the first thing this morning. I have made my plunge and the foregoing chill has given place to the warm "reaction." The audience was more numerous than had been expected, some 250, and exceedingly sympathetic, laughing at everything, even whenever I used a polysyllabic word. I send you the "Scotsman," with a skeleton report which might have been much worse made. I am all right this morning again, so have no doubts of putting the job through, if only I don't have too much sociability. I have got a week free of invitations so far, and all things considered, fancy that we shan't be persecuted.

Edinburgh is surely the noblest city ever built by man. The weather has been splendid so far, and cold and bracing as the top of Mount Washington in early April. Everyone here speaks of it however as "hot." One needs fires at night and an overcoat out of the sun. The full-bodied air, half misty and half smoky, holds the sunshine in that way which one sees only in these islands, making the shadowy side of everything quite black, so that all perspectives and vistas appear with objects cut blackly against each other according to their nearness, and plane rising behind plane of flat dark relieved against flat light in ever-receding gradation. It is magnificent.

But I mustn't become a Ruskin!--the purpose of this letter being merely to acquaint you with our well-being and success so far. We have found bully lodgings, spacious to one's heart's content, upon a cheerful square, and actually with a book-shelf fully two feet wide and two stories high, upon the wall, the first we have seen for two years! (There were of course book-cases enough at Lamb House, but all tight packed already.) We now go out to take the air. I feel as if a decidedly bad interlude in the journey of my life were closed, and the real honest thing gradually beginning again. Love to you all! Your ever affectionate

W. J.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

EDINBURGH, _May 30, 1901_.

DEAREST FANNY,-- ...Beautiful as the spring is here, the words you so often let drop about American weather make me homesick for that article. It is blasphemous, however, to pine for anything when one is in Edinburgh in May, and takes an open drive every afternoon in the surrounding country by way of a constitutional. The green is of the vividest, splendid trees and acres, and the air itself an _object_, holding watery vapor, tenuous smoke, and ancient sunshine in solution, so as to yield the most exquisite minglings and gradations of silvery brown and blue and pearly gray. As for the city, its vistas are magnificent.

We are _comblés_ with civilities, which Harry and Alice are to a certain extent enjoying, though I have to hang back and spend much of the time between my lectures in bed, to rest off the aortic distress which that operation gives. I call it aortic because it feels like that, but I can get no information from the Drs., so I won't swear I'm right. My heart, under the influence of that magical juice, tincture of digitalis,--only 6 drops daily,--is performing _beautifully_ and gives no trouble at all. The audiences grow instead of dwindling, and in spite of rain, being about 300 and just crowding the room. They sit as still as death and then applaud magnificently, so I am sure the lectures are a success. Previous Gifford lectures have had audiences beginning with 60 and dwindling to 15. In an hour and a half (I write this in bed) I shall be beginning the fifth lecture, which will, when finished, put me half way through the arduous job. I know you will relish these details, which please pass on to Jim P. I would send you the reports in the "Scotsman," but they distort so much by their sham continuity with vast omission (the reporters get my MS.), that the result is caricature. Edinburgh is _spiritually_ much like Boston, only stronger and with more temperament in the people. But we're all growing into much of a sameness everywhere.

I have dined out once--an almost fatal experiment! I was introduced to Lord Somebody: "How often do you lecture?"--"Twice a week."--"What do you do between?--play golf?" Another invitation: "Come at 6--the dinner at 7.30--and we can walk or play bowls till dinner so as not to fatigue you"--I having pleaded my delicacy of constitution.

I rejoice in the prospect of Booker W.'s[35] book, and thank your mother heartily. My mouth had been watering for just that volume. Autobiographies take the cake. I mean to read nothing else. Strange to say, I am now for the first time reading Marie Bashkirtseff. It takes hold of me tremenjus. I feel as if I had lived inside of her, and in spite of her hatefulness, esteem and even like her for her incorruptible way of telling the truth. I have not seen Huxley's life yet. It must be delightful, only I can't agree to what seems to be becoming the conventionally accepted view of him, that he possessed the exclusive specialty of living for the truth. A good deal of humbug about that!--at least when it becomes a professional and heroic attitude.

Your base remark about Aguinaldo is clean forgotten, if ever heard. I know you wouldn't harm the poor man, who, unless Malay human nature is weaker than human nature elsewhere, has pretty surely some surprises up his sleeve for us yet. Best love to you all. Your affectionate

Wm. James.

_To Henry W. Rankin._

EDINBURGH, _June 16, 1901_.

DEAR MR. RANKIN,--I have received all your letters and missives, inclusive of the letter which you think I must have lost, some months back. I professor-ed you because I had read your name printed with that title in a newspaper letter from East Northfield, and supposed that, by courtesy at any rate, that title was conferred on you by a public opinion to which I liked to conform.